Far across the war-torn lands of Velaryn, where the forests twisted into dead groves and the stars themselves flickered dimmer above the shattered skies, a lone tower stood like a splinter in the bones of the world.
They called it Thornehold—once a watchtower of the Arcane Council, now a forgotten ruin lost to maps and myth. Here, Kaelen the Exiled kept silent vigil, surrounded by ancient tomes, crystal mirrors, and the slow, deliberate ticking of arcane timepieces that no longer followed the sun.
He stood before a scrying mirror, its surface writhing with smoke and colorless flame.
And then—he froze.
The surface cracked with a sudden shudder. Red lightning bloomed across the glass like veins.
Kaelen's silver eyes narrowed.
"It has begun…"
He waved a gloved hand over the mirror, muttering in the old tongue. The storm inside it twisted and refocused—revealing an image not of Kael, but of what had awakened beneath Dravenhold.
A presence.
A gate.
A will.
Kaelen staggered back, his face suddenly pale.
"No… not yet. He's not ready."
He turned swiftly, pulling a heavy chain from around his neck. From it hung a sliver of obsidian etched with runes that pulsed in sync with the mirror's storm.
He crushed it in his hand.
Across the chamber, several figures stirred—silhouettes wrapped in cloaks of dust and warding sigils. Kaelen's apprentices. Survivors. Arcanists, bladesingers, one even a Veil-touched seer who no longer spoke with a human tongue.
One stepped forward—Nyel, a scarred woman with silver-threaded black robes and a jagged dagger made of soul-iron.
"What did you see?" she asked.
Kaelen's voice was iron.
"Kael has breached the first seal beneath the Rivenhart throne. The Veil stirs around him."
Nyel's eyes widened. "Then the Crimson Sovereign prophecy—"
"It was never a prophecy," Kaelen snapped. "It was a warning. And he's walking straight into it."
Kaelen turned to the oldest book on the pedestal beside him—The Blood Lexicon, bound in flesh and stitched with sovereign thread. He flipped the pages with practiced hands.
"The Sovereign will feel this," he said. "Every ward we set, every seal we bound—it won't hold if Kael keeps opening them."
"And yet you trained him," Nyel said quietly.
"I had to. He's the only one who can withstand the Veil and still remain whole."
"Is he still whole?"
Kaelen looked into the storm-filled mirror.
That question… had no answer.
High above the tower, hidden beneath the cloud-thick heavens, a crack split the night sky—only for an instant.
An eye, impossibly vast and rimmed in red flame, opened in the Veil and gazed down upon the world.
It watched Kael.
It watched Kaelen.
And it remembered.
Kaelen turned from the mirror, cloak snapping behind him as he moved to his war table—maps, artifacts, and old oaths waiting.
"Prepare the wards," he ordered. "Send the signal to the last of the Council. The world needs to remember what lies beneath the Crimson Throne."
"And if Kael goes too far?" Nyel asked.
Kaelen's voice was low.
"Then I will do what I must. Even if it means ending him."
"In the beginning, before kings wore crowns and blood chose heirs, there was the Veil."
—Fragment from The Codex of Broken Suns, banned by the Arcane Council
Long before Velaryn was a kingdom—before the noble houses, the Arcane Council, or the rise of the Blood Sovereign—there was only war and wild magic. The world was split, torn between realms: the mortal world of stone and steel, and the Crimson Veil, a shadow-realm of pure chaotic energy, where emotion shaped reality and time flowed like bleeding ink.
The Crimson Veil was not a place to be ruled. It was a storm of consciousness. A living will. And it did not suffer mortals lightly.
Yet mortals, as ever, sought power.
A man named Azarion, ancestor of both Kael and Malrik, was the first to cross into the Veil and return alive. He was not a king—not yet—but a warlord, desperate to protect his people from the ruinous god-beasts that roamed the mortal world. In the heart of the Veil, Azarion made a pact with a presence known only as the Flame That Watches.
"Give me power enough to bind the storms," Azarion said, "and I will feed you my line, one heir per age."
The Veil agreed. And Azarion returned wielding black lightning and a burning aura that devoured demons whole.
He became the first Crimson Sovereign.
But power, as the Veil warned, came with a price.
Azarion's descendants were bound to the Veil by blood and soul. Every few generations, one would be born with red eyes and fire in their veins—marked as the next vessel of the Veil.
The people worshiped them as divine. The Arcane Council, fearing the Veil's growing influence, declared them cursed.
Thus began the centuries of silence and sabotage.
Each generation, the chosen heir was either crowned… or killed.
Two centuries before Kael's birth, the line faltered.
One heir, Auren Rivenhart, refused the call of the Veil. He broke the ancestral pact, sealed the ancient gates beneath Dravenhold, and tried to end the curse forever.
It almost worked.
But another child of Azarion's blood had been born… not to the main Rivenhart line, but to a bastard house hidden in the north.
That child was Malrik Draven.
Unlike Auren, Malrik embraced the Veil. He completed the broken pact in secret, offered sacrifices, and took the throne by fire and betrayal—not as a rightful heir, but as the Veil's chosen substitute.
Years later, Auren's final heir—Kael—was born, and the Veil flared again.
Two vessels.
One throne.
One true bond.
Though Kael was just a boy, Malrik sensed his presence, knew his blood was older, purer. That's when he attacked House Rivenhart—not merely to conquer, but to eliminate the rival vessel before the Veil could awaken in him.
Kael survived. The Veil waited.
Now, as Kael opens the gate Auren sealed centuries ago, the Veil watches once more.
And the old contract stirs.
"The Sovereign shall fall, and the Vessel shall rise… but only one may wear the Flame."
—Last recorded prophecy of the Crimson Seer, 118 years before Kael's birth